From this question, Umberto Eco on photocopies: ‘Photocopies are indispensable instruments. They allow you to keep with you a text you have already read in the library, and to take home a text you have not read yet. But a set of photocopies can become an alibi. A student makes hundreds of pages of photocopies and takes them home, and the manual labour he exercises in doing so gives him the impression that he possesses the work … There are many things I do not know because I photocopied a text and then relaxed as if I had read it.’ Eco might have been talking about any form of mechanical reproduction (shades of Benjamin), in that the act of acquisition and collecting seems to rapidly usurp the experience of actually using or enjoying something. This collectomania is one of the defining elements of modern consumption. Discuss / other things. Music by Art School Girlfriend / paper cuts and doodles by Melanie Titmuss / paintings by Jon Pilkington / the story of the Headington shark.

How to Study the Bible – the Language of Colour, by Thomas Macklin, 1909. “A highly idiosyncratic, eccentric and colourful engagement with his Bible by an East Anglian merchant, who over a twenty year period (c.1888-1909) extensively annotated the volume throughout in bright colours, following a system of his own devising… Words and phrases on each page are washed over or outlined (often both) in watercolours, in one of eight colours – each denoting a meaning: Yellow (God Speaking), Blue (Good. Honest), Green (Bad. Evil), Violet (Name of Place), Black (Devil. Sin), etc.” / other things. A portfolio of pictures from the Bell Labs data center in Oakland, California, 1969 and 1970 / via MeFi / art from the future, a tumblr / ghost characters and lost elements, some musings / ‘you’re alone in a small Russian apartment in a concrete tenement: it’s Winter.’

Berberian Sound Studio becomes a stage play. See our earlier post, Aural Excitements / all the strange things are collated and presented by 41Strange, which is a veritable dark cave of the uncanny and the esoteric in 20th century media / an obituary of John Harold Haynes, instruction manual pioneer (via MeFi). Haynes is one of those companies, like Pantone, that while it never lost sight of its core business, obviously succumbed to the advice of a marketing and diversification specialist at some point. Pantone is still the industry standard, but also a lifestyle and consumer product supplier. Similarly, Haynes diversified into Practical and Lifestyle Manuals, where you could learn about things that exist (or once existed) and things than manifestly don’t exist, rather blurring the lines of what a manual actually is. Nevertheless, the company single-handedly flies the flag for technical drawing / also recently passed, Jim Dunlop, creator of electric guitar accessories / psychedelic noise making devices from digdugDIY.